By Linda Blackford | Editor
It’s a sad day in Kentucky this morning. Just a week after the death of beloved neighbor Dolly Parton, we’ve lost of our own and one of our greatest: Wendell Berry. The writer, farmer and activist died on Monday at his Henry County Farm. He’s known for so many words and so much wisdom that he sent out around the world. Sarah Ladd wrote the obituary below.
Here is one of his most famous poems, “The Peace of the Wild Things.”
“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
-From the collection The Peace of the Wild Things and Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)
Wendell Berry with Nip and Jed, Lane’s Landing Farm, Henry County, KY 2012. (Photo by Guy Mendes)
By Sarah Ladd
Kentucky writer and conservationist Wendell Berry once wrote: “Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.”
A lover of forests, the farmer, author and former English professor died on Monday at his home in Port Royal, according to the New York Times and other media reports. He was 92.
By Liam Niemeyer
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman and other Republican attorneys general are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a lower federal court’s decision that upheld more stringent air pollution limits established under the former Biden administration.
Demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, marking the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where the late civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
By Ashley Murray
WASHINGTON — Just over two months from midterm elections and four months removed from a U.S. Supreme Court decision that gutted Voting Rights Act protections for majority Black U.S. House districts, and 63 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech there, thousands gathered again at the Lincoln Memorial Friday.
Lexington and other Kentucky cities are losing big businesses, which affects jobs.
COMMENTARY
By Ross Boggess
Valvoline Global Operations announced Monday that they are moving its global headquarters from Lexington to downtown Cincinnati. Cincinnati’s mayor called it “a huge win… for our local economy, and for the momentum our city and partners have been working to build.”
Their gain is Lexington’s – and Kentucky’s –direct loss.
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